MBA1696 Lessons I Learned by Growing Fast in 2020

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Investing involves risk, including risk of loss, online US equity trades and ETFs and retail fidelity account sell order assessment fee not included, some account types and securities excluded. Details@fidelity.com commissions Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC member NYSE SIPC I want to start this episode by saying this is not about me beating on my chest and saying look at me, look at our company. We grew this much. I'm actually going to be quite vulnerable and share a lot of some mishaps that happened in the year because of this growth. And just for context, we didn't start webinar ng yesterday. We will be in business for seven years come April, so it almost took nearly six years to hit this crazy rapid growth. So we're definitely not an overnight success. We've been trying to prepare for this for some time and I want to share with you how it all worked out in 2020. Now, up to this point, before 2020, we've had steady growth, so it's very predictable about how many resources we need in terms of customer support or developers or if we need to spend more money on advertising. All that was kind of predictable. But there will be a time in your business where you'll have drastic growth because of an event. For us it was Covid, but it could be something different for your business. Forbes might mention you in an article and that will give you incredible traffic. A random influencer or celebrity might use your product or buy your product and mention it on social this is actually more common than you think. A big brand or a big business with a following might use your product and mention on their blog. This has happened to us before as well, so you might have These spikes that lead to tremendous growth for a period of time. So these events, these spikes are unpredictable. You don't know when this is going to happen. So how can you prepare? Well, you can prepare to some extent. So one lesson I learned something that really prepared us was that in our business we create something called standard operating procedures, SOPs. And this basically is documenting every single task that we do in our business. We are really, really anal about this. I know this sounds really, really strict, but to the point where we have a procedure for answering emails on support, for publishing podcast episodes, we have a procedure for every single thing in our business. And the reason why we do this is so that if we ever hire somebody, training that person to do a task is not going to be super, super hard. It actually is like self study. They can do it on their own. It also allows other people on the team to pick up a task if they need to help out by just following the sop. So I highly recommend that you start creating standard operating procedures for every little task in your business. And you can start with one department, like support. There are tons of questions that get repeated day in and day out. How do I receive my password? Can I get a refund? What's your refund policy? Do you accept American Express? All these questions get asked over and over for many businesses and you can create standard replies. Now, they don't have to reply word for word whoever uses this sop, but the point here is that they have a source of truth somewhere they can go. Now, what does this have to do with growth? Well, if you have an explosion of growth and all of a sudden you have all these support tickets in your queue and you're like, whoa, I don't have enough agents. In fact, I'm the one who's answering all support tickets. Well, what you can do is one, obviously you can put a job post and start hiring, but you still need to train them. You still need some onboarding. It's going to take a couple weeks, but in the meantime, you can ask the rest of your members to jump in, or you can get a freelancer really quickly to answer at least the SOP questions that are in your queue and immediately that alleviates a lot of the stress and the problem of long wait times for support. So SOP is huge, huge thing that helped us. One thing that we were not prepared for was how quickly we had to hire. In 2020, we hired 11 new full time hires. Some of these hires were repeat hires, meaning that we hired for this position before, like customer support. Agents. So that was pretty easy to do because we had a job post set to go, we knew exactly where to post it. We had a whole system for application and interviewing. But some hires were brand new, brand new positions. That was a brand new job post. So one of the things we didn't do that we should have done was write out the job descriptions for the next positions you want to hire. So we had a list of positions that, okay, these are the next hires we want, want to make. These are the new positions we want to fill. We had that in place, but we didn't take it a step further and have those job descriptions really fleshed out, understand exactly who we're looking for and what we want them to do. Because what happened is that, oh man, we need this person and this person, this person to meet this growth and to really capitalize on this opportunity of all this traffic that's coming our way. So we had to spend a lot of time on saying, okay, we need to really flesh out who you're looking for so we can find the right candidates, we can make the right hire quickly. So if I had to do it again, I would definitely have those job descriptions all ready to go. Even though you're not hiring now, it's good to have them in a bank in your Google Drive. So when it's time to hire, if you have to hire, you can easily post that job description. All set to go. One thing that we did do that was really, really effective that I would recommend, especially if you are growing rapidly and you need to make more than one hire for one position. You want to hire multiple developers, multiple support agents, whatever it is, hire more than you need. Okay, you need to see the first three months of your employees time with you as an extended interview. It's going to take you far longer to go through a month long screening and interview process than to say, hey, they fulfill the qualifications through the screening process, through the application. We go through a couple interviews and everything checks out with references we hire. So this is a lot faster turnaround. This is like a week, maybe even five days, days. And then you basically in your contract say your first 90 days, your first three months is a chance for us to get to know each other, for you to see if you want to stay with us and for us to know if you're a good fit for the position. And we overhire expecting that not everybody's going to stick around. So say for example, you need to fill two positions in support, let's say for example, hire four people. Okay, because chances are one of them is going to say it's not a good fit. The other one's not going to work out because they're not going to really cut the mustard. They're not going to be able to actually do the job as required. Under hiring is really something that will really hurt you in the long run because you'll be constantly hiring and spending too much time. You want to save the time of the whole process of hiring, as well as training them and onboarding them by just doing it once over hire and then let go if it doesn't work out. Now, of course, if they all work out, which is unlikely, I've been doing this for seven years, like I said, and I've never done this where everybody works out. But if it does, that's okay. You're prepared for growth. Another thing I learned is that when you are growing fast, if you're getting a lot of traffic to your site, a lot of traffic to your tool, a lot of traffic to your product, this is going to put a lot of toll on your servers. This is especially important if you are in software, where your product is a site is software, it is on a server. But even if you are in E commerce, if people can't get to your website and it crashes for some reason they can't buy, your store is ineffective. It's basically out of business for a brief period of time while you're down, or I should say out of order. You really need to focus on your infrastructure when you're growing, when you're seeing the traffic come in. This is something that we did very early on. As we saw things start to ramp up in March and April, we decided, hey, we got to change priorities. We were working on certain new features on certain new things, and we said, you know what? We need to focus on stability and make sure that everybody can access the app as well as access our website with no slow experience on the website. Now, this was a bit of a bummer because it delayed a lot of the things we wanted to release at a certain period of time. It delayed a lot of our goals really for each quarter. But when things change in your business, you have to pivot. You have to be able to adapt. At one point we made the change on our servers, we increased the capacity, and in the meantime, the traffic tripled even after we measured. Hey, we're growing so much. And the next day we were down for about an hour. And it was the first time we were down in a very long time. We had to do some Maintenance to really beef up our server to overcompensate. We paid for some incredible infrastructure that we didn't really use. It was just a safety measure to make sure that we can handle any traffic. Now, you never want to go down, but sometimes you have to so you can do a major maintenance overhaul, especially when it comes to your servers for your website. And there will be some downtime. And as long as you inform your customers in advance, that's okay. People are used to this. The other thing you want to watch out for when you're growing is that sometimes when you're growing month after month and it's really fast, you think this is going to happen. It's going to continue to grow at this pace forever. So you tend to maybe overspend, thinking, hey, I can't overspend because next month it's going to keep growing. Be careful how you spend your money. Make sure you're still profitable even with the growth and the extra spent to manage that growth, because you don't know when that spike will start to teeter out. And it will teeter out at some point. It might not teeter out to the point where it was before your fast growth, but it will not just continue to skyrocket forever. There'll be some dips along the way and you want to be caught unprofitable, right, because you overspent. Being over ambitious in that whole experience.

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To wrap up today's lesson, it's such a ride to grow quickly, to meet demand quickly. But one of the things I can really advise you to do, that I really stand behind 100%, is no matter how many growing pains you have in that growth, any kind of mistakes you make, any stumbles, even if you go down or you have some issues with your products or delivery or whatever it is, as long as you make customer support a priority where you communicate with your customers, you let them know you, make them feel like they're taken care of, people will forgive a few mistakes, they're okay as long as you treat them well. I mean, look at Amazon. During COVID their delivery windows went totally out the window, right? But people still use Amazon. They don't stop using them. And as long as they communicate these delays, everybody's okay. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love it, you hear smash that subscribe button on whatever app you use to listen to podcasts, whether it's Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, Himalaya. We're on every single one, so make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss a beat. Also, by hitting subscribe, which is absolutely free, you get access to over 1600 episodes in our archives. It's the only way to get access. So go ahead and do that right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this Sometimes we get caught up in the stress and the hustle when we're growing quickly and we forget to take just a brief moment to say, wow, I'm proud of my business, of my team, of what we've done. When you're growing, you've made it, you've done it. You have product, market fit. This is a good thing. Sometimes we don't take time to celebrate those wins. So take a moment, even if it's just a minute or two, to take a breath and say, you know what? This is a lot of work. This is stressful, but this is a good problem to have. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Freeride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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